A piece for orchestral players but with no instruments sounds like a perplexing contradiction in terms. Such, however, is Anna Meredith's HandsFree, one of the New Music 20x12 commissions to mark this year's Cultural Olympiad, and given its premiere in Liverpool by the National Youth Orchestra. Pitched somewhere between classical and performance art, it's essentially a work about body percussion, fantastically planned and choreographed.

The players clap, stamp, shuffle, shout and sing. The rhythmic sound patterns are mirrored by platform routines of considerable complexity. Meredith throws in a few Ligeti-like ululations to form points of stasis or relaxation, but the overwhelming impression is one of mounting exhilaration. It's a tour de force for the NYO, who performed it from memory and were greeted with a standing ovation, richly deserved.

The rest of the concert was less iconoclastic. Paul Daniel conducted: the programme flanked Elgar's Cello Concerto with Turnage's Hammered Out and Walton's First Symphony. Hammered Out, which rings changes on Beyoncé's Single Ladies, finds Turnage in bad boy mode with a classical/R&B fusion. The orchestration is unvarying, though the playing was classy. Natalie Clein, meanwhile, was the declamatory yet lyrical soloist in the Elgar, a performance that was admirably unsentimental if a bit deliberate and over-controlled.

The Walton, though, was wonderful. Like HandsFree, the piece is rooted in rhythmic complexity, and the performance generated a comparable sense of edge-of-your-seat excitement. Daniel shaped it superbly well, and the playing was outstanding, with some beautifully honed woodwind and brass solos, and a real sheen in the strings. The NYO's practice of doubling and trebling parts has occasionally led to a sense of overload in the past. Here, everything just sounded admirably clear and spacious.